SaaS is also an extremely attractive business model for some software vendors.

Revenue for SaaS software companies tends to be much less volatile.

Multipliers used in mergers and acquisitions for SaaS-only software companies tend to be very high due to the recurrent revenue that comes with the pay-as-you-go model.

In early 2013, IFS North America and Advantage Business Media conducted a study among executives with industrial companies to determine how respondents involved with enterprise resource planning (ERP) and other enterprise software perceived various methods of software provisioning, including on-premise, hosted, software as a service (SaaS) and private cloud.

Historically, ERP and other enterprise software was housed on servers on the premises of a business. The increasing availability of high bandwidth LAN, WAN, dark fiber and public Internet connections, however, has broken down the geographic barriers that made the on-premise delivery model the only option.

Another technological change that is affecting how enterprise software is provisioned is the availability of clustered server technology delivering variable capacity that can be sold on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Prior to this, servers ran applications in a linear design without extensive redundancy or scalability. Scalable and easily partitioned server technology is available now that can allow organizations with centralized computing resources to sell computing resources over the public Internet as a service. The infrastructure itself can be purchased as infrastructure as a service (IaaS), or it can be paired with an operating environment or other facilitating technologies as platform as a service (PaaS). Either way, an end user can be relieved from responsibility to purchase and maintain hardware.

Here are the top 10 strategic technology trends that will impact most organizations in 2017. Strategic technology trends are defined as those with substantial disruptive potential or those reaching the tipping point over the next five years. ... More >>